Renault impressed after front wing testing

Renault have confirmed they will race with a new concept front wing in the Australia Grand Prix after it proved successful in testing yesterday.

Both drivers utilised the new front wing yesterday and the team are very happy with how it performed.

Technical director Nick Chester said: “We had our new front wing here, so we compared that with both drivers.

“They both prefer it and works as per (wind) tunnel, so that is good news and has sorted our front wing spec for Melbourne.

“We can see (improvement) in lap times and we can see it in all the measured loads, so it is working quite well.

“It is positive because the front wings can be tricky things and it is very easy to end up with a correlation problem when you bring a new front wing and it doesn’t do what you think.

“Here it has panned out exactly how we expected which is good. So it means we can develop the new front wing and work on the furniture, the strakes and get more power out of it. So it is good.”

Sainz, who took to the track in the second part of the day after lunch said “A front wing always changes the feeling of the car a little bit and we need to learn from it.

“I felt some difference there but still need to see - how much progress is difficult to say at the moment.”

Renault finished yesterday 4th and 5th on the timing sheet after completing 148 laps whilst on the hard tyre compound.

This is an improvement to their 7th and 8th finish from Wednesday’s session using the old style front wing.